Internet Explorer 8, Flash and 64 bit operating systems

You would have thought the latest technology would all be designed to work together, but often engineers get ahead of themselves and it takes a while for things to catch up.

For the past year I’ve been unable to run any Flash in Internet Explorer 8 (Microsoft’s latest browser) because I’m running a 64 bit version of Windows (latest version). I don’t generally use IE because it is slow and leaks memory like a sieve (to be fair so does Firefox – after 6 hours use it’s not unusual to look and see that for displaying 1 web page it requires a whopping 1.5 Gigabytes of memory!) – but this is the nail in it’s coffin.

But now, with IE9 on the horizon (shudder), Adobe seem to be be putting in some effort to resolve this and have released a development beta to deliver Flash in IE8 on a 64 bit platform. Although the production release is no doubt intended to coincide with the release of IE9, if you want to get video etc. working in IE8 then head over here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html and download this “Download active-x for 64-bit Windows — for Internet Explorer only“. Note: this isn’t supported so I’d recommend that you only download the IE version and keep an eye out for future updates.

Finally – the latest bits of technology seem to be coming together – and there are encouraging sounds that IE9 will play ball too…

About Gerald Thulbourn

Gerald Thulbourn setup WebSanity in 2004. He has a 1st class honours MEng in Microelectronics & Software Engineering (i.e. he's a techy), 5 A grades at A level (i.e. he works hard) and loves to communicate (i.e. odd for a techy). He hates tech speak, sloppy/badly tested code, and technology for the sake of technology's sake. He loves helping people understand marketing concepts and seeing how their application makes a real difference to their business. In particular he loves training; SEO, Website Analysis, WordPress etc.
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